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by throwaway_yy2Di 4570 days ago
According to the wiki article on the topic ([0], citing [1]), you could get significant terraforming of Mars with something on the order of 39 million tons of CFCs. One Falcon rocket can carry 14 tons there, so that would naively 2.8 million Falcon launches, at a current cost (@$100MM/launch) of $280 trillion. (And surprisingly little terrestrial CO2 emissions -- only about 3 billion tons).

As ealloc points out [2], this particular fluorine compound isn't very different, as a greenhouse gas, from the other CFCs these estimates are based on.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Use_of_fl...

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/98/5/2154.full.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889978